Even war can’t stop her party

SMOOTH lines of trance music melt under the voices. Ice dissolves slowly in vodka. Eyes slide over to have a look.

In the cathedral-style grandeur of the Buddha Bar, at the feet of a massive metal Siddhartha, half-darkness softens the faces of well-heeled diners. Dry martini in hand, a stooped, white-haired man named Riyad Tabet is trying to explain the charms of the woman next to him, the woman he calls his “sweetheart.”

“She’s like Eva Peron in Lebanon!” he says, consonants bearing the rusty scrape of his French education. “Everybody loves her. She is so popular.”

“But not with the poor,” protests Vivian Edde, her mascara-ringed eyes opening wide, eager to set him straight. “Only with the rich.” She seems to startle herself by saying it. But then she tosses her head back and laughs gleefully, showing off her teeth, and repeats it a few times. “Not with the poor. Not with the poor! Eva Peron for the rich. Ha-ha-ha.”

And with that, Lebanon’s famed society columnist click-clacks forward into another glittering night on high heels. She is on the hunt for new faces, new gossip, new possibilities whispered in the darkness of Beirut’s many dance clubs.

What does it mean to be a society columnist in a war-ravaged country, a place where parallel societies exist like two strangers staying, unknown to each other, in adjacent hotel rooms? It’s an exercise in negation, evening gowns and fetes draped over a volatile and dangerous reality. But for Edde, it is also an existential struggle, a fight to hold intact the Lebanon she knows, to preserve her lifestyle in the face of Israeli bombardment and Hezbollah militancy.

In truth, Edde is better understood as a Marie Antoinette than an Eva Peron, a woman who lives a life utterly removed from the realities of many of her compatriots: the country people, the poor, the disenfranchised Shiites who embrace Hezbollah. And -- make no mistake -- she knows it.

“I’m like a critic of the salon. The way they dress. The things they say,” she explains, carefully fluffing out a brunet coif. “I like the superficial way of life.”

A slender and well-kept widow who appears in public carefully made up and outfitted in plunging designer dresses, Edde won’t say how old she is. “If you give your age, it means you are going to give everything,” she scolds. “And I’m not going to give you everything.”

Edde’s monthly column is the mainstay of Mondanite, a fat, flamboyant magazine packed with semi-candid photographs of the rich and advertisements for Dior and Chopard. She’s an emblem of her class, her writings an icon of the rambunctious and rarified lifestyle that continues to absorb the attention of Lebanon’s sizable upper crust despite the distractions of violence and upheaval.

“People went up to the mountains and beaches just to let the war pass,” Edde says. “It’s like a natural disaster that we have to bear; we can’t do anything ... they feel apart from it. People just think, how will they make a party or have a cocktail?”

She stops, and considers.

“Look, they are a little bit concerned,” she corrects herself. “It’s like if you have a friend and he is suffering. They didn’t dare make really big parties.”

The civil war is just a few nightmares away in this tormented land, which staggers today under the weight of bomb wreckage and renewed political animosities.

Today’s Lebanon is home to fiery, turbaned Hezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah -- and that most effervescent of Arab sex kittens, voluptuous singer Nancy Ajram.

Pictures of Nasrallah’s bearded face adorn the road to the airport and rise throughout the land. To many Lebanese, he is a hero -- champion of downtrodden Shiites, defender against Israeli invasion, a leader whose son was killed fighting against the Jewish state.

But when his name comes up at dinner one night, Edde rears up.

“He’s not Lebanese!” she says loudly, face furrowed. “He’s -- he’s -- he’s -- “ She finally spits it out: “Iranian!”

Edde has been kidnapped by Hezbollah (more on this later) and driven from her homeland by war. She spent much of her life exiled in Paris and Spain. But she doesn’t dwell on these hardships. On the contrary, she deems any discussion of war a taboo.

“All the politicians are saying the same ‘blah, blah, blah’ for 30 years,” she says. “You just have to take the dates of the newspapers and change them.”

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EDDE starts her day at 2 p.m., slinking across the floor of her sun-flooded apartment with peacock silks swishing behind her. She goes out nearly every night, puts in an hour of writing before turning off the light and spends most of the morning in bed. As for lunch, she scoffs at the notion -- it’s only women, she complains, and daytime gossip is boring. Nighttime is for secrets. She swears by it.

Night after night, she selects from hundreds of evening gowns and sallies forth from her home on Monot Street, the trendiest artery coursing through the Christian heart of Beirut.

A French-educated Christian, Edde was born into Lebanon’s onetime ruling class. Her grandmother came from France and, Edde explains pointedly, lived here for 40 years without learning Arabic. She too struggles with Arabic.

She grew up in Hamra, a neighborhood in what is now predominantly Muslim West Beirut. Like many families, hers decamped to a Christian area as religious sects sorted themselves into segregated enclaves during the civil war. Edde fled to Paris in 1978 and worked as a journalist there during some of the worst years of the civil war.

She returned to Lebanon in 1984 and was promptly nabbed by Hezbollah.

When she speaks of the kidnapping, she paints herself as Zsa Zsa Gabor meeting the militants. She was seized at a checkpoint; it was her birthday. Edde had just come from Monte Carlo and was about to zip off to America. When she set eyes on the Hezbollah offices in Sidon, where she was held with two other journalists, she informed her kidnappers that they needed to liven up the interior decoration.

“I said, ‘You need to make it more stylish, more trendy,’ ” she says. “They thought I was crazy.” After a few days in captivity, she was released.

These days, she says, Lebanon is divided between “those of us who are not afraid to die and those of us who only want to live.”

The title of her column, La Vie en Rose, is a tribute to her professed dedication to seeing life through rose-colored glasses. The monthly pieces are printed on pale pink paper so they stand out, and inserted in the centerfold section of Lebanon’s best-selling magazine.

Edde’s columns run on for pages and pages, chronicling the escapades of the rich and fashionable -- in other words, her friends, whom Edde unabashedly refers to as “the beautiful people,” “the jet set,” or simply “our people.”

Writing in French, the lingua franca of Beirut’s moneyed set, Edde spins her tales. The disgrace of two young socialites who wore the same designer gown to a party. The competition between two bachelors to have more flings.

With the government crumbling around them, Edde and her friends speak as if they are strangers in their own country.

“They always put forward the bad side of Lebanon: the Muslims, the Palestinians, the ladies with this,” magazine founder Assaad Omeira makes a ring around his face, indicating a Muslim head scarf. “We don’t deny we have this....” He trails off, at a loss for words.

“Problem!” suggests businessman Walid Yasmine from across a dinner table loaded with sushi.

“It is,” Omeira agrees, “a kind of problem.” Edde looks on, smiling, eager to push the talk back to “our people.”

“As long as there are parties and life in Beirut, I am staying,” she says. “Otherwise, I prefer Spain.”

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megan.stack@latimes.com